Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to interactive documents and, more particularly, to techniques for detecting, validating, and correlating form-fields in a scanned document.
Description of the Related Art
Online form filling solutions have become commonplace. Companies, such as ADOBE Systems Incorporated of San Jose, Calif. provide solutions, for example, FormsCentral and LIVECYCLE forms for authoring forms, distributing forms, and collecting data from users who fill out the forms online. Most form-filling solutions provide interactive forms. However, many scanned (i.e., non-interactive or flat) forms already exist. It requires a significant amount of effort to create interactive versions of the existing scanned form documents. Currently, optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms are used to detect the presence of fields in scanned form documents, however, OCR algorithms are notoriously unreliable and inconsistent, and fail to identify a data type of a field or provide suggestions for or validation of field entries. In addition, OCR algorithms fail to provide correlation of related fields. Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus for detecting, validating, and correlating form-fields in a scanned document.